VICTORIA, BC, Canada -- Poco Systems Inc, developer of the award-winning email software PocoMail celebrates its 5th anniversary today by announcing the upcoming release of Barca, seamless integration of an email program, personal information manager, and project planner. Aimed at the professional and business market, Barca will provide a single interface to manage personal and business information, plan and schedule tasks and appointments, communicate with others, and collaborate on team projects.

Information management allows the user to improve their productivity by managing their communication and work-related activities in a single safe and secure program. Barca's innovative sidebars allow simultaneous display of several information panes, including the calendar, mailboxes and contacts. With Barca, users can schedule appointments and tasks, view calendar and deadlines by day, week, month, and year, track projects, manage contact information, use popup notes to take down phone conversations and meeting notes, even record business or personal diary. Additionally, users can collaborate on projects by saving common files and project plans on the network. Barca also offers a sophisticated scripting language that allows system administrators and technical users to extend Barca’s functionality beyond what is available out of the box.

Barca's email features go beyond the norm when compared to other information management programs. The powerful email facility is based on the proven PocoMail technology. Integrated Bayesian filtering, together with sophisticated rule-based junk mail filtering control the inflow of junk mail. Many security features ensure that email viruses and HTML tracking tags are rendered harmless. Email capabilities are tightly integrated with time management and calendar functionality. Barca's simple yet powerful interface ensures easy access to the myriad of features offered, so that adding an appointment from an email message is a single click away. Barca is compatible with POP, IMAP and SMTP email protocols and can be configured to work with Microsoft Exchange server. NNTP support for Newsgroups is also built-in. Barca will run on Windows computers.

Poco Systems started 5 years ago in 1999 with the release of Poco 1.0, which was praised for its small size, simplicity, ease of use and design. A year later, Poco 2.0 was released, followed by Poco 2.04 in May 2000. With improved functionality and a better interface, Poco 2.04 was named the 2000 PC Magazine Shareware of the Year. PocoMail underwent major changes and resulted in the release of PocoMail 2.5 in June 2001, winning much needed recognition from the software email market and software developers. 2002 saw the release of the revolutionary PocoMail Portable Edition, an email client that was developed to work off a USB drive, giving mobile professional a safe and secure mobile email client along with the power and functionality of a desktop email client. Last year, PocoMail 3 was released and localized into six languages and selected as editor’s choice by PC Plus (UK) and PC Authority (Australia), amongst others.